PART TWOI could have been driving for no longer than a few minutes when I turned down a road onto a little suburban street- you know, two cars on every drive and all that. Like before I had to swerve to avoiding hitting somebody, accept this time it was two people, a man lying in the road and a girl kneeling next to him.
I would have done the sensible thing and just driven on had the girl not decided to start banging on the car window (the not broken one). I switched the ignition off and got out. The girl could have been no more than 15, 16 at most and her face was all red and puffy. “It’s my dad..” She said pointing at the body lying in the road. “One of those things got in him…”
“You mean those bug things?”
She nodded. “It jumped at him… and got inside of him…” I looked past the girl to where the body was. It looked very much dead. The chest wasn’t moving at all.
“Look, call an ambulance- they can help you.”
“I’ve tried!” She wailed, “The phones are dead!”
“Look there must be somebody on this street who can help you!”
“They all went!” She waved her arms to emphasis a point.
“Went where?” I said. I was in no mood to argue with an upset teenager, but I didn’t want to be stuck out here if there were those… bug things.
“After the earthquake… they all went… Dad said we’d be safe, he didn’t believe it… but they…”
“Christ…” I said not listening to her. Behind her, her until recently deceased father was now standing. Like the other guy, he had a rather large hole in his chest with something filling up that hole.
“Dad!” The girl screamed in joy and ran towards him. Her dad ran towards her and they gripped each other in an embrace. For a moment, just a moment, I thought she might be safe. Her dad had two large hands which he wrapped around her neck. The sound of the snap was disgusting. He let her body drop and ran towards me.
Not hesitating I jumped back into my car and slammed the door. Before I knew it the father (or what used to be the girl’s dad) had reached the car and punched in the window. Glass fell across the other seat and I got the car started.
He was a big guy, but he still thought he could fit through the little window, his arms reached frantically. As he tried to crawl through he was cutting himself on the broken glass, trickling blood in several places. If he felt it he certainly didn’t show it. The one thing that got my attention was that his eyes were completely and utterly black, I barely had time to notice the grey shape that filling in the hole in his chest. Though I recognized the spindly leg sticking from it.
If I had been paying more attention to the road than the black eyes maybe I wouldn’t have crashed the car. I didn’t realized that I had veered over the left quite a bit and was dead in line to hit a lamppost. I braked, and that only helped a little. The car bonnet wrapped itself around the lamppost, and my car died there and then. I got off considerably luckier than the car. I hit my head off the steering wheel, causing a rather large bruise and a nasty headache.
I blacked out, but it was for no more than a minute or so. I managed to lift my head up and see the guy was no longer trying to get into my car. He’d been flung off and was now impaled on some iron gates that some clever sod have decided to put up instead of a fence.
I opened the car door and practically rolled out onto the street. My head was spinning like I’d been on the Tea Cups. Christ, those things always made me sick.
Then I looked up and saw what was ahead. “You’ve got to be kidding…” I murmured almost drunkenly. Ahead of me there were about 7 or 8 of those bug-things coming right towards me. I pulled myself off the ground and somehow found the energy to turn and run. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re shit scared.
